Aiding and Abetting a Real War

The good news about Moammar Gadhafi's demise arrived via my cellphone early Thursday morning. A friend from the Reagan administration, remembering the Libyan dictator's attempt to kill my family, called to let me know and added, "You must be very glad to see this day." But it doesn't seem to be a time for celebration.

Most of the Libyan people seem to be rejoicing -- and with good reason. They suffered the most under the egomaniacal despot. But unless you are a U.S. Air Force, Navy or Marine pilot who had to brave anti-aircraft fire in Operation Odyssey Dawn, Moammar the Magnificent hasn't posed a serious threat to Americans for years. Now, thanks to the Obama administration's "no boots on the ground" policy for war fighting, America and our allies may actually be more vulnerable.

Members of the O-Team are busy backslapping and giving one another high-fives for their brilliant "no American casualties" strategy. They hope we forget that this mission, which began March 19, was supposed to be over "in days, not weeks." And they surely do not want it widely known that thousands -- perhaps tens of thousands -- of man-portable surface-to-air missiles are missing from Libyan ordnance depots. Now consider the "message."

President Barack Obama and our State Department are big on sending "messages." For months, they have been telling us that Gadhafi would fall because that's the inevitable result of brutal repression. They claim that the collapse of his regime sends a message to any government that spawns terror and denies basic human freedoms to a subjugated people. But that's not the lesson learned by the theocrats in Iran.

Last week, Attorney General Eric Holder announced the indictment of four Iranians for conspiring with a Mexican drug cartel to murder the Saudi ambassador -- and perhaps a hundred or more Americans with a bomb planted in a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton then told us this plot was a "dangerous escalation of the Iranian government's long-standing use of political violence and sponsorship of terrorism." Apparently, the O-Team didn't notice that the plotters allegedly received "go ahead" orders from Tehran to carry out the attack well after the "Arab spring" revolts were toppling and threatening authoritarian leaders throughout the Middle East. And anyone paying attention for the past 32 years should know that mass murder is hardly a new tactic for Tehran's ayatollahs.

Oliver North is a nationally syndicated columnist, the host of War Stories on the Fox News Channel, the author of the new novel Heroes Proved and the co-founder of Freedom Alliance, an organization that provides college scholarships to the children of U.S. military personnel killed or permanently disabled in the line of duty. Join Oliver North in Israel by going to www.olivernorthisrael.com.